The challenge of suburban policing

Updated: 9:20 p.m. | Posted: 6:19 p.m

There are still few answers in the shooting death of Philando Castile by a police officer in Falcon Heights, Minn.

There's been plenty of speculation into what happened before St. Anthony police officer Jeronimo Yanez fired multiple shots into Castile.

Did it start with, as Castile's girlfriend said, a broken tail light? Or was it a case of mistaken identity? Or racial profiling?

It could be a while before investigators answer the "why" question, and we may never fully know.

But as Castile's shooting death has added to mass criticism alleging racial bias in police forces around the country, suburban departments in the Twin Cities face a glaring issue: Officers are often policing citizens of communities that aren't their own.

Larpenteur Avenue, where Castile was stopped, is a county road and major thoroughfare. Four different police departments patrol a stretch just five and a half miles long from Lauderdale to Maplewood. Castile lived in St. Paul, which is nearby the roadway.

Every police department is different in how it approaches traffic stops, said Maplewood Police Chief Paul Schnell. It can even vary from officer to officer.

It appears St. Anthony police, who also cover Lauderdale and Falcon Heights, make more traffic-related arrests than other departments, based on data from suburban police departments.

More than 80 percent of arrests by St. Anthony police in 2015 were for traffic-related offenses, including DWI, according to the department's annual report.

Schnell says suburban police departments often interact with people passing through the town on a shopping trip or commute.

"We cannot think in terms of geographic boundaries anymore, because the reality is we all live our lives in very different places," he said.

That means suburban departments usually aren't arresting their own citizens.

Data on where arrestees live wasn't available from St. Anthony police, and officials with the department didn't respond to requests for comment.

But in the neighboring suburb of Roseville, data shows that nearly half of all arrests in 2015 were of adults who live in Minneapolis or St. Paul, which are both more racially diverse.

In Maplewood, Schnell said his department did a rough analysis of juvenile arrests in Maplewood and found that most of those youths lived elsewhere.

Police departments' outreach activities have traditionally focused on their own residents.

St. Anthony police spent time in schools and churches, with Cub Scout troops and residents in assisted living facilities. Almost all these activities took place within city limits.

Schnell says it might be time for a new approach.

"When we talk about the need for intervention and relationship-building and all those sorts of things, it becomes clear that we really need to think about how do we create relationships across especially mobile communities, and that could mean people who access bus routes, it could mean people who work at a given site but may not live in the community that we're policing," he said.

Racial tensions between police and minority communities have swelled in recent years, spiking again in Minnesota after Castile's shooting.

At the same time, the Twin Cities metro area has become more racially segregated, according to Myron Orfield, a University of Minnesota law school professor who studies civil rights law, segregation and racial profiling.

For example, he says some 80 elementary schools have populations that exceed 90 percent people of color. Housing policies have also driven racial segregation and helped contribute to some of the worst racial disparities in the country, he said.

Orfield published a study more than a decade ago showing that when white, suburban communities were situated next to poor communities, there were a lot more police stops.

"People don't know each other. These officers live in a totally different world than the people they're policing. Places where people live together, where they share neighborhoods and schools, you see a lot less trouble like this," he said. "Segregation and poverty have created these huge problems and huge misunderstandings between the races."

On Friday, during an emergency city council session, Falcon Heights Mayor Peter Lindstrom has promised transparency in the Castile shooting.

"This incident has ripped into the fabric of our small community here in the heart of Minneapolis and St. Paul," he said. "We have just started the process as you saw a moment ago of gathering information, a process we pledge will be fully transparent."

A city council panel authorized spending to deal with any protests or other fallout. It also hired Blois Olson as a public-relations consultant.

Lindstrom said it's too soon to comment on what may lie ahead, including includes whether the city is bracing for legal exposure and evaluating its policing relationship with nearby St. Anthony.

Correction: The above copy has been corrected to say Peter Lindstrom is the mayor of Falcon Heights. A previous version identified him as the mayor of St. Anthony.